Cancer organizations, institutions mobilize together during the COVID‐19 pandemic

When the COVID‐19 pandemic first emerged in the United States a little over a year ago, leaders of the National Comprehensive Cancer Network (NCCN) quickly recognized that they needed to develop and disseminate guidance on how best to treat and protect cancer patients. Thankfully, the NCCN knew just where to turn for assistance: to clinicians at the Seattle Cancer Care Alliance (SCCA), located in the heart of the pandemic's first US epicenter.

“They had this incredible wealth of experience,” says Robert W. Carlson, MD, chief executive officer of NCCN, the nonprofit alliance of 30 leading cancer centers across the country. “They called me on a Wednesday and said, ‘We're dealing with stuff everyone else needs to know; can we write a paper about how we organized?’ By Saturday, we had a copy of their paper. It was peer reviewed that weekend and posted online by the following Tuesday.”

SCCA is a collaboration of the research and medical teams at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center, Seattle Children's, and the University of Washington. The article, published in the Journal of the National Comprehensive Cancer Network, provided a roadmap on how to continue to provide optimal cancer care during the pandemic. ¹ The authors highlighted their incident command structure that coordinated the institutional response to the ever‐changing situation, as well as their phone triage line and efforts to reschedule “well” visits and elective surgeries. The paper was just one early example of the massive cancer community response to the multitude of new challenges that occurred throughout the past year.

“The overall response of the oncology community has been really remarkable and totally non‐competitive,” Dr. Carlson says. “We've come together to share best practices. It makes me proud to be an oncologist.”

NCCN also responded early on to the pandemic on a variety of fronts. One of the first things leaders did in early March was cancel their annual conference, scheduled for later that month in Orlando, Florida. Calling it “a pretty bold decision at the time,” Dr. Carlson says that in retrospect it was the right choice. In addition, the organization's best practices committee, chaired by Timothy Kubal, MD, MBA, an oncologist/hematologist at the Moffitt Cancer Center in Tampa, Florida, quickly launched a series of hourlong COVID‐19 response phone conferences for member cancer centers. The calls, held consecutively for the first 11 weeks, are now offered monthly to allow member sites to ask questions about how best to handle cancer care during the pandemic.

“We came together to make care‐facing decisions and gave the best guidance we could in a very uncertain situation,” Dr. Kubal says.

NCCN also created a COVID‐19 resources section on its website and published 2 more papers, including 1 in October entitled, “Creative Strategies Implemented During the Coronavirus Pandemic That Will Impact the Future of Cancer Care.” ² Furthermore, the organization sponsored a series of webinars in collaboration with the American Cancer Society, some geared toward providers and others toward patients and caregivers. Written materials on self‐care and stress management for patients, survivors, and caregivers also were made available and translated into Chinese and Latin American and European Spanish.

“We can't lose sight of the fact that as overwhelming as it is to be caring for cancer patients now, it's even more overwhelming to be a cancer patient, and they need a lot of support,” Dr. Carlson notes.

One of the NCCN webinars focused on changes that are occurring in cancer care. Johns Hopkins Medicine in Baltimore, Maryland, for example, launched a curbside clinic where patients can receive their medications and injections and have blood drawn without ever having to leave their cars.

“Johns Hopkins shared everything with us, and we implemented the program at Moffitt and plan to continue it after the pandemic is over,” Dr. Kubal says. “Patients and caregivers love it because they don't have to sit and wait—they save hours at a time.” Ultimately, both Johns Hopkins and Moffitt providers hope to expand their clinics to include more of the subcutaneous chemotherapy drugs.

Now that many cancer patients are becoming more comfortable with returning to in‐person visits, cancer centers are working on how to ramp back up to accommodate them. Moffitt, for example, began experiencing an uptick in patient visits in early December.

“We had about a 50% to 60% decrease in new patient visits at the beginning of the pandemic, and now we're seeing more than the average number of patients,” Dr. Kubal notes. “I think patients have realized they'll have to have these visits, and we've been pretty transparent about our COVID‐19 positivity rates and COVID‐19 patient numbers.”

At the same time, telemedicine visits continue to be in high demand at Moffitt, he adds, averaging about 800 per week. Both Dr. Carlson and Dr. Kubal emphasize that telemedicine will continue to play a major role in health care but that it must continue to be reimbursed by the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) and private insurers. NCCN also is pushing for a national medical license versus separate state licenses as a way to further enable telemedicine around the country.

“In times of crisis, new solutions emerge and are very quickly adapted, but they also can be long‐term solutions to other problems,” Dr. Carlson says. “We shouldn't abandon the progress the pandemic has made us achieve in order to go back to what it was like before.”

International Information Sharing

Meanwhile, St. Jude Children's Research Hospital and the International Society of Paediatric Oncology (SIOP) united to create the Global COVID‐19 Observatory and Resource Center for Childhood Cancer website, which can be accessed at global.stjude.org/en‐us/global‐covid‐19‐observatory‐andresource‐center‐for‐childhood‐cancer.html. The site provides a way for oncologists to collaborate, connect, and find the latest information on COVID‐19 as it relates to childhood cancer.

“We needed a mechanism to create and transfer knowledge to health care professionals across the world,” says Daniel Moreira, MD, St. Jude's director of Global Professional Education, who helped develop the resource center. “In the beginning, there wasn't much information, but there was a lot of misinformation.”

The site's 3 main elements include a resource library of curated publications, a registry that serves as an open data repository for patients with childhood cancer who were infected with COVID‐19 after undergoing bone marrow transplants, and a collaborative space in which medical professionals can interact with colleagues. The registry features a visualization platform that helps users to access numbers of patients, disease severity, and outcomes data. At press time, more than 1100 patients were registered from 40 countries. St. Jude and SIOP also launched and continue to host webinars for medical professionals called “COVID Conversations.”

As part of St. Jude and SIOP's global support initiative, researchers conducted a study on the pandemic's impact on access to cancer care worldwide. More than 79 countries and 200 institutions responded to their questions, and nearly 70% reported declines in the number of children diagnosed with cancer as compared to prior years.

“It's worrying because the impact is more marked in low‐and middle‐income countries,” Dr. Moreira says. “Their health systems are already stressed, and then you add a pandemic. What this means for [childhood cancer] survival, we don't know yet. We haven't seen the full extent of the effects of the pandemic on children who have cancer.”

Printz C. Cancer organizations, institutions mobilize together during the COVID‐19 pandemic. Cancer. 2021. 10.1002/cncr.33509